Governance as Cultural Practice: Texts, Talk and the Struggle for Meaning

Abstract

The increasing emphasis on the citizen-consumer in the reform of public services in Britain and beyond is open to different interpretations. Within governance theory it might be understood as yet another phase of the continued blurring of distinctions between state and market, government and society. Alternatively it might be viewed as marking new forms of collaboration between service organizations and ‘empowered’ service users. Yet such interpretations tell us little about why the consumer stands as such an iconic figure in programmes of modernization; how consumerism may open up new forms of claims making on the part of social actors, nor how it sometimes forms a focal point around which resistance to the perceived demise of the social democratic welfare state is voiced. The importance of these ‘struggles for meaning’ in shaping social practice and informing patterns of institutional change is the focus of this chapter. It proceeds as follows. I begin by reviewing some of the difficulties of conceptualizing ‘the social’ in governance theory; then go on (section 2) to highlight the contribution of ethnography, discourse analysis and cultural perspectives in research on governance as a changing ‘order of rule’, and the new patterns of relationship and identification that may result. Section 3 sets out a framework of analysis, and briefly illustrates ways in which such a framework might be used to enrich understandings of the place of the citizen-consumer in changing forms and strategies of governance.